BRACKNEY, Pa. (CBS) — Is a Pennsylvania inn haunted?
Some folks in Brackney, Pennsylvania, are spooked after spotting what they say was a ghost inside a haunted inn.
Some say they saw a spirit in the window of the Brackney Inn.
Volunteers were helping clean up rubble after a fire destroyed the building last month.
They say things seemed a bit off, then one of them spotted the figure.
“They were taking pictures of the front of the building and
when he went back to look at his house, he was kind of freaking out
about the picture because it looked in one in the windows like there was
someone standing there,” said inn owner Gleg MacBlane.
“The more I looked at it, the harder it was to believe it
could ever be the angle of the sun or something at all like that,” said
Matthew Hallick, who spotted the figure in the picture.
THE
LITTLE GIRL is a frequent visitor to the second floor of City Hall. She
slips - unseen - past the police officers outside Mayor Nutter's
office. She secrets herself within a majestic room called Conversation
Hall. She is not supposed to be there, unsupervised, at all hours of the
night.
Officer George Feinstein, part of the mayor's security detail,
acknowledges that he's never actually seen the girl. But twice he's
heard her giggle while making his second-floor rounds. He's also heard
her sigh, breezily, as he chitchatted with some City Hall visitors.
"It was like we were boring," Feinstein said.
On a cold, starry Saturday night last month, as a sliver of moon glowed
above Billy Penn's hat, Feinstein and a group of fellow ghost hunters,
including two other Philadelphia police officers, set out to find the
girl.
The Nutter administration agreed to open City Hall to Feinstein's group, called Olde City Paranormal, and to a Daily News reporter and photographer (after signing a waiver agreeing that the city could not be held liable for any injuries).
The night, which began at 8 o'clock, was the first official ghost hunt
to be held within the 114-year-old limestone French Second Empire
headquarters of Philadelphia government.
Feinstein, who has patrolled City Hall for seven years, was determined
to learn more about the girl. How did she die? When did she die? Why did
she haunt Conversation Hall?
Was it because the room is fit for a princess? High golden ceilings,
plum-colored drapes, rose-hued marble columns and a spectacular bronze
chandelier, perfect for any girl to twirl endlessly beneath.
The group sat expectantly within the darkened room about 10:30 p.m.
Feinstein, 48, the kind of cop you want to confide in, started to talk
to the girl.
"My name is George," he said. "You know me. I've been in and out of this
room tons of times. Why don't you say 'hi' like you did? We're not here
to hurt you. We just want to make contact with you, if that's possible.
Can you tell us your name?"
A Pennsylvania witness at Phoenixville reports watching a "massive,
circular craft" that seemed to change shape as it moved overhead just
after midnight on October 1, 2012, according to testimony from the
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.
(side-note) The 1958 science-fiction horror movie “The Blob” with Steve McQueen was filmed in Phoenixville PA.
The witness was standing in his backyard at the time when he first noticed the object.
"As it made its way into my full view, I noticed it seemed to look
like a very large over-sized jet with white lights - at least three on
each side - of what at first appeared to be wings, as well as red
lights on the under belly of the craft," the witness stated. "As this
object started to pass above me I remember thinking this plane is huge."
But then the object's shape appeared to change.
"This object appeared to change shape or the clouds moved around and
away from it. The craft may have rotated or changed direction at this
point, it was all so breathtaking I was just in shock of what I was
seeing. I could have possibly been seeing some sort of cloaking
technology."
York, PA - Two glazed, beady eyes of a blonde-haired baby doll pierced the darkness, staring at Jan Klinedinst and Tom Shirey, as if to cry out, "Hey, I'm watching you."
But silence -- or so it seemed -- filled the second floor of the John Wright Restaurant, a former warehouse built in 1916, as Shirey reached for his tripod and audio recorder.
"I wish I had a third hand to pick everything up," he said, tucking the pink-clad toy, jittery eyelids and all, under his arm.
An audio replay of that moment reveals a young girl's high-pitched voice seemingly squealing, "Let me see!" amplified using Audacity audio software by Tom Arnold, the team's tech guru.
To some, it's all coincidence -- street noise or an intercepted cellphone transmission.
For generations the Christmas season has been infused with sweetness, but some families in Philadelphia are adding a dash of horror.
There are no Christmas lights up at Janet Finegar's house in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. She does not deck her halls with boughs of holly. Instead, hundreds of rib bones leftover from a neighborhood barbecue hang on a clothesline strung across her backyard. They're bleaching in the sun.
"They have been scraped, boiled, scraped again, bleached and are now strung on strands and hanging out to dry," she says. "They smell. Rib bones, as it turns out, are incredibly nasty."
She will drape the bones over herself and wear them like a grisly tunic. It's her Krampus costume.
The Krampus is a character from European Alpine folklore, common in Austria and Switzerland. The creature stands on two hooves and has horns growing out of its skull. An extremely long tongue hangs out of its mouth, and it carries a basket to haul away naughty children.
For hundreds of years, the Krampus and Saint Nicholas have worked a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. Saint Nick rewards the good children; Krampus terrorizes the bad.
For Finegar, it's the perfect antidote for Christmas.
"If everything is sweet and beautiful and lovely and the most wonderful time of the year, some people, like me, start to get a little nauseated, want a little salt to go with the sugar," she says. "I think there [are] a lot of people out there who enjoy the idea of having a little salt."
Around the country, there are Krampus parties and club nights in December, where people dress in leftover Halloween costumes to drink and dance.
Janet Finegar shows off her costume of rib bones
Janet Finegar will be one among many parade participants dressed as the mythical Christmas demon Krampus.
Finegar is helping to organize a traditional Krampuslauf: a procession of people dressed as Krampus, walking through the streets with noisemakers. The idea for the Krampuslauf in Philadelphia came from Amber Dorko Stopper, a mother of two.
"Spooky and scary has had a place in Christmas historically — A Christmas Carol is a ghost story with scary things in it," she says. "I hate to see everything get watered down because I remember how much fun those things are."
Krampus parades are rare in the United Sates. Last year, Joseph Ragan organized one in Portland, Ore., as a reaction to the way Christmas dominates the winter season.
"Of all the 10,000 holidays that can be celebrated, we just have this one particular version of this one particular holiday really shoved down our throats for months at a time — in the most saccharine form," he says.
Consider that Christmas muzak you hear in grocery stores before Thanksgiving. That really annoys Stopper. She's a fan of horror movies, and enjoys the folk tales of Krampus stealing children, throwing them into icy rivers or eating them alive.
"I realized really quickly how that was not popular in this time period. As a parent of small children that was seen as suspicious behavior almost immediately," she says. "Everything is so soft-pedaled these days with kids to the point where you're not showing any kind of conflict to your kids, much less folklore."
But even Stopper admits there are limits.
"Since both of our children are adopted, we're a little extra sensitive to talking about being taken away," Stopper says. "But we did tell them that, 'He'll take you to his house, you'll have to eat spicy vegetables and watch boring adult television — and then he'll bring you home.' "
